Cardamom

It may seem strange, in the middle of winter, to be writing about an herb, especially a tropical one.  But this is the time of year when I always enjoy a cup of cardamom tea, and cardamom is also appropriate for the season of cold and ’flu.  Elettaria cardamomum, also known as green or white cardamom, is one of the two types of “cardamom” used as a spice in Indian and other South Asian cooking (the other is black cardamom, Amomum subulatum).  Both are members of the ginger family, but green cardamom is the herb I am discussing here.  Its seeds are used as a medicine as well as a flavoring spice. 

     Cardamom tastes cool, fresh, slightly sweet and peppery, and makes a wonderful flavoring ingredient for everything from curries, chutneys, pulses and rice to kulfi (a kind of ice cream).  (Cardamom kulfi is a great party treat and simple recipes for it can be found on the internet.  Even though I usually don’t do dairy these days, I love it!)  It also makes a great tea.  Because cardamom can be quite expensive, it is commonly used as a flavoring in black tea, or mixed with other spices and black tea in chai, but I like it alone as well.  It is important to buy cardamom seeds still in their papery pods, and only take them out when you are planning to use them (you can even leave them in the pods when you cook with them).  They should be stored in an airtight jar, otherwise they will lose their flavor after a while, even if they are still in their pods.  A couple of fingers-full of seeds crumbled to powder can make a good tea, and you will definitely get your money’s worth in taste if you keep them fresh.

     Medicinally, cardamom is approved by Commission E for treating colds, bronchitis, sore throat, coughs, and fevers.  Cardamom has virustatic properties, and the monoterpene essential oils found in it are antibacterial and antimycotic.  Cardamom is also used for gallbladder and liver complaints because of its cholagogic properties, but it can actually aggravate certain gallbladder and liver problems as well.  I would only recommend it be used by someone with liver or gallbladder problems under the supervision of a trained herbalist or other medical specialist familiar with its use in inducing bile flow.  It is also used traditionally for digestive problems.

     So if you’re feeling a cold coming on, or you just want a tasty hot beverage, make yourself a fragrant cup of cardamom tea on a frosty winter night.

Brevity

I bought a lovely little book today, at a fair, from Gene Keller, musician, poet, performer extraordinaire.  He was selling these gorgeous little books of his, a collection of poems entitled Brevity.  Each book was hand-made out of lovely paper; each one unique, beautifully-crafted, and perfect.  The typeface was artistic and bold and strong, and the poems were wonderful--deep, honest, full of peace and joy.   Holding the little book in my hands, reading the poems slowly and meditatively, I was continually struck by their freshness, a quality so rare in writing today; youthful words of a poet grown old.  There was so much in the whole aesthetic experience: the physical beauty of the book, the clarity and song in the words, the wonderful person of Gene, and the whole history he embodies here in El Paso.  There was more in the book than just what the words said.  There was music and laughter under enormous stars and a mystical crescent moon, love and friendship, the search for deep and enduring truths, devotion to color and beauty, enchantment and mischief; a place of doves and glorious sun; a whole world of magical possibilities.

Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe

Cuix amo nican nica nimonantzin? Cuix amo nocehuallotitlan, necauhyotitlan in tica? Cuix amo nehuatl innimopaccayeliz? Cuix amo nocuixanco nomamalhuazco in tica? Cuix oc itla in motech moneoui?

¿No estoy aquí yo, que soy tu madre? ¿No estas bajo mi sombra y resguardo? ¿No soy yo la fuente de tu alegría? ¿No estas en el hueco de mi manto, en el cruce de mis brazos? ¿Tienes necesidad de alguna otra cosa?

Am I not here, I, who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?                          --Nican Mopohua c. 1556

The Servant is Not Greater Than the Master

We know next to nothing about Homer, Shakespeare, and Molière, to take a few of so many, many, examples.  And yet we know Odysseus, Hamlet, and Tartuffe so well that they have become "types" we can immediately recognize.  In Hermann Hesse's Die Morgenlandfahrt, the protagonist H. H. learns the great lesson that fictional characters are, in fact, more real than their creators.  And that the one must diminish as the other grows.  That is the ideal.  The law of service, embodied in our willingness to do the task of creating a work of art, regardless of whether our personality or even our name remains attached to it.  Because, in the end, it is not ourselves or even our readers that we serve, but the work itself.  We have no right to demand fame or fortune or even recognition for our work.  The opportunity to do the work is all the payment that is due to us.  To understand this is liberation and joy, but it is also the best, perhaps even the only, means to assure that we will always do our finest work, freed from the burden of praise or censure, the burden of both failure and success.

 

St. Francis and the Wolf

On this beautiful Feast of St. Francis, I think of how relevant the story of St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio is for us today, in a world torn by war and hatred.  For the people of Gubbio, the wolf is not just a ruthless killer, he is even worse than that.  In their eyes he is irrational.  He has no personhood.  He is simply the adversary.  He has no conscience and can’t be reasoned with—he is beyond conversion, beyond redemption.  He is an inhuman monster.  Is this not the way that we, as individuals and nations, always depict our enemies?  We can hate them without guilt because they are not persons in our eyes, because we believe them to be invincibly evil (and ourselves the champions of good), which gives us the certainty that the only solution is to destroy them, brutally and without remorse.  But Francis courageously seeks out the wolf, boldly confronts him face-to-face, armed only with love and the hope of reconciliation, and calls him “brother.”  He begins by recognizing the personhood of Brother Wolf.  He enlightens him, aware that in order to do so he must begin with an understanding of who the wolf is—where the wolf is “coming from”—his hunger, his loneliness.  And then he helps the wolf to recognize a path to transformation, to the adoption of a new way of living.  He shows him the way to a new mode of being with others.  He brokers a peace between the wolf and the people of Gubbio.  So perfect is the peace he creates between the people and the wolf that they end up neighbors and friends.  They come to love and care about each other.  That is the power of active non-violence, its power to conquer fear and hatred, if one is simply courageous enough to call the snarling, bloodthirsty enemy “brother” or “sister,” and to make peace, not by destroying that enemy, but by the redemptive, the transformative, power of love.  Each of us, and most especially our leaders, the ones who give the orders to kill on a mass scale, must follow the path that Francis took—for no other path can succeed—if we truly want our cities and our world to live in peace and safety, and if we truly desire a world where we will live like brothers and sisters.

After the Rains

The air above Dunn Park, swimming with dragonflies, under the tall Chinese elms.  And the hill above it, the reservior hill, that rocky andesite outcrop, is greener than I can ever remember seeing it, carpeted with wildflowers, ephemerals, drought evaders.  The gift of the September rains.

America and Its Allies: Shoot First, Think Later

So, ISIS brutally beheads innocent civilians.  In response, President Obama and his European bullies blow the heads off innocent civilians with bombs and missiles.  Both sides claim they are fighting evil.  But in reality, both are doing evil.  The fact that we have learned nothing from the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we are now willing to make common cause with Assad and the Iranians, that we are giving arms to factions in Iraq that were our ‘enemies’ in the last round, guaranteeing a hundred more years of instability and hatred, shows what little moral consideration has gone into the decision to plunge us into another war.  Clearly, Obama is guided more by fears of a Democratic Party defeat in November than any reasonable ethical, strategic, or even military considerations.  The fact that we created this situation by our invasion of Iraq (again, with our sycophantic allies, especially the U.K.), and by our long, desultory involvement in the civil war that followed, is never even mentioned by the cheerleading, colluding press. The parallels to Vietnam are so obvious to anyone who knows anything about twentieth-century history.  Why are our leaders so morally bankrupt?  President Obama expressed his sorrow and outrage on national TV after the Sandy Hook massacre, and rightly so.  But what about the hundreds of children killed by drone strikes, by our training and arming of rogue armies around the world to fight our proxy wars; what about the children killed in the ongoing conflicts we started in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we are now escalating there and in Syria.  Despite all the rhetoric about “smart bombs,” civilian casualties as a percentage of total casualties keep rising in each successive war the U.S. wages [Ahlstrom, C. and K.-A. Nordquist (1991). Casualties of conflict: report for the world campaign for the protection of victims of war. Uppsala, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University].  Bombing of civilians is simply murder carried out without our having to see it close up, My Lai executed from the air.